Inside the massacre

The Wall Street Journal reports on the massacre last week in Mazar-e-Sharif:

Officials are painting the weekend killings at the United Nations mission in northern Afghanistan’s largest city–which sparked cascading violence across the nation–as the handiwork of a small band of insurgents that used a protest against a Quran-burning as cover for a murderous plot.
But a Wall Street Journal reconstruction of Friday’s assault, based on unreleased videos, interviews with demonstrators and the U.N.’s own recounting of events, shows a more complex picture and indicates that ordinary Afghan demonstrators played a critical role in the attack.

The story by Dion Nissbenbaum and Maria Abi-Habib, with additional credits to Yaroslav Trofimov, Zamir Saar, Michael Allen and Betsy McKay, is must reading.